Good coffee is hard to find. I'm on a mission to make it easier. I started in Korea, moved to Sweden, and now I'm in New York, hunting for the best, and sharing the journey with you here.
Send me a tip, feel free to share your own experiences or questions in the comments, and above all, drink better coffee! :)

The trajectory (or descent?) into coffee madness usually starts with an experience at a quality focused cafe, which leads you to buy better beans, which sparks the realization that your home setup is inadequate, followed by the purchase of a better grinder and some kind of manual brewer. At this point you start to realize...

Earlier this summer I took a trip back to the US to visit family, having been abroad for the past year and a half. A stopover in London was the same price as a direct flight, making it a perfect opportunity to explore the Anglo coffee world and meet some of the people I’d only...

Streamer Coffee is a cool cafe located in a more residential part of Shibuya, not far from the station. It’s run by Hiroshi Sawada, a latte art champion, along with Takehiro Kato. They have quite an ambitious array of branded products (t-shirts, leather cup-holders, glass jars, etc. etc.), including some co-branded with Espresso Parts (you...

Omotesando is a neighborhood known for its cluster of high-fashion flagship stores (Chanel, Dior, Prada, you name it, it’s there), as well as its boulevard lined by Zelkova trees that provide welcome shade and refreshing greenery. It’s in this setting that we visited Anniversaire Cafe and found ourselves in the midst of a wedding ceremony,...

Cafe de l’Ambre is a quirky Tokyo legend, located a few zigzagging side-streets away from the main shopping area at Ginza. You may have seen it mentioned before when Australian barista champion Scott Callaghan wrote about his trip around the world here. The coffee bar and roastery has been around since the late 1940s and...

In Korea I tried a lot of cafes, and drank a lot of bad coffee on the way to finding the great cafes that I’ve written about here. Coffee is expensive (I’ve paid as much as $15 for a bad cup of coffee in Seoul), so after a while I started avoiding places with signs...

Update Jan 13, 2012: A reader in the comments writes that this cafe is now closed, replaced by an Italian restaurant. Enjoy the post below for historical purposes :) Here’s the first in a series of reviews I’ll be posting from my trip to Japan last August. I was only there for five days so...

I walked into an antique shop next to my apartment here in Malmö and was surprised to see this giant vintage coffee grinder, apparently made in Denmark sometime in the 1920s and used at this location for almost as long. The woman who’d been working there for something like 20 years only spoke Swedish, so...

Man Seeking Coffee recently posted a link to Coffee Collective’s google map of cafes using their beans, which gave me a starting point for exploring Copenhagen’s cafe scene when I visited yesterday. The first location, called Cafe Norden, basically ticked off all the boxes on the list of preconceptions I had for what a ‘European...

Belief is a relatively new cafe that I first visited many months ago in the Hongdae neighborhood of Seoul, Korea. When I stopped in the first time they were just setting things up, didn’t have an espresso machine installed, and were still apparently adjusting their roast profiles. I stopped in again a couple months ago...

UPDATE: La Caffe’s owner writes in the comments below: “Big thanks to all our lovely customers. LaCaffe currently closed. We are renovating to cafe related business workshop, not cafe. See you soon with big news.” La Caffe is a restaurant and cafe hidden away in the neighborhood near Wangsimni station. I heard that they had...